Today, I spent 8 hours in the lab for the Group 4 project. My group consisting of Tiankai, Sharon, Brandon and Justin investigated the amount of Vitamin C in various fruit and found out that among oranges, lemons, tomatoes and apples, oranges had the most Vitamin C per dollar. So if you’re sick, go for oranges!

I have nothing much to type about, so I’ll just post my reflections.

Working together with Tiankai, Justin, Brandon and Sharon for this Group 4 project has been a pleasurable experience. Our group faced 2 major obstacles throughout this journey together.

Firstly, at the planning stage, we ran into trouble coming up with suitable ideas for the Group 4 project. We spent much time coming up with at least 4 proposals before we could finally obtain approval. These times were most trying for us because our patience and resilience were put to the test. Although we had to sacrifice a lot of time and effort in discussing our proposals, this provided the opportunity for us to work together and in the process, learn more about each other.

Secondly, during our execution of the experiment, we ran into problems such as the concentration of iodine was being much higher than the concentration of Vitamin C in the fruit and the filtration of fruit juice being too slow and unproductive. This made us rather frustrated, but we persevered in trying to troubleshoot the situations and when we finally came up with solutions to overcome them, it was heart-warming to see the joy on the faces of my team mates.

Hence, despite the difficulties we faced during the project, we managed to pull through as one and produced a good piece of work.

Being aware of our strengths and weaknesses, my group divided the labour such that those who were better in certain areas like manipulative skills and data processing skills were in charge of duties like titration and analyzing results respectively. My weakness lies in manipulative skills, so I helped out in my stronger areas such as the preparation of the fruit juices and calculations of the data collected while others like Justin and Tiankai were in charge of the titration.

Through this Group 4 project, I became more confident in sharing my ideas. As an introvert, I usually keep quiet most of the time and when I had ideas, I would just keep them to myself for fear that they were foolish ones. This was more so when I was not working with people I was very familiar with. However, I decided to give it a try. I tried giving a minor suggestion at first, and when I saw that my team mates listened and gave my idea much thought and respect, I became more and more confident in giving suggestions and participating in the discussions. Hence, I have emerged from this project a more confident individual.

In conclusion, the Group 4 Project has been an enriching experience for me. I am very sure that the bonds formed with my team mates and lessons learnt from beyond the classroom will stay with me for a long time.